The Google Drive has now launched and become available! Tuesday April 24th is the day that Google launched its file storage and sharing service (GDrive or Google Drive). This service is along the lines of Dropbox, Box or JungleDisk. It allows users to upload files through a folder on their computer that syncs to the google storage cloud. You can then view these files on any other computer or Mobile device. It's main competition is Jungledisk, Dropbox, Rackspace Files, Amazon S3.

Analysis

Google Drive operates much in the way that Dropbox does, allowing users to seamlessly drag and drop files into Cloud storage. The major benefit to the Google Drive is the built in web-app editor, allowing you to edit, share, and collaborate on documents of over 30+ file types. Google Drive currently works on PC, Mac, Android and has IOS apps in creation with a due date of a few weeks.

Current users of Google Docs will be sent over to Google Drive immediately after enabling the service. It seems that Google has changed Docs over to Drive in a “re branding” effort.

Storage

Google drive gives all users 5 GB of storage for free, with an upgrade to 25GB for only $2.49 a month, or 100GB of storage for 4.99 a month. If you upgrade to the 25 GB plan, your gmail storage will also be increased to 25 Gigs. (Seems google is integrating storage quota’s across all platforms).

With this attractive pricing model, users are able to store large amounts of data for a minimal monthly fee. The stability of Google’s storage and current applications will ensure your files are available 24/7 without error.

Conclusion

With less than an hour on the product itself, it is difficult to say how the product launch will go.. (Those who know what Google Wave was, will understand). That said, I am now syncing all my files off of Amazon S3 and Dropbox over to my GDrive. It will certainly be interesting to see what the competition does in response to this move by Google. Similar to how Google revolutionized email, this very well could have a major impact on how files are stored and shared.

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